Harmony concepts torrent

Nature is first evoked through literature, and immediately becomes animated sexualized. Poetamenos is a series remarkable, paradoxically enough, for both its consision and opulence; its restrained formalism concealing a torrent of emotions and sexual longing.

Before her arrival the poet is inert, rock-like. She is thus Echo, or rather Syringa. Augusto de Campos is obviously a refined reader, capable of incorporating onto his writing the most avant-garde tendencies available around.

He is also the author of three volumes of translations of Provencal poets. It is interesting to note, however, that despite the great variety of interests evident in his translation work and writings on music, his own poetry is in essence influenced by specific threads in Brazilian popular culture.

Ultimately, the bridge proposed by de Campos between twelve-tone theory and samba is what prevents Poetamenos from being a mere illustration of a thesis. It precedes, rather than tropes, our primarily visual use of the word image. In his Concerto for Nine Instruments of , for example, all the pitch material is derived only from the three-note series B-Bb-D and its three mirror forms retrograde, inversion, retrograde inversion.

This diagram, which Webern used as the basis for his Concerto, op. Paris : Al Dante, Melhoramentos, This convoluted line would suggest thus an inversion of the biblical account of the creation of Eve. Such is the nymph Echo, a thing not substantial but only a voice; or if it be more of the exact and delicate kind, Syringa ,—when the words and voices are regulated and modulated by numbers, whether poetical or oratorical.

Campos, Augusto de. These processes of marginalization, of flight, in differing degrees, release becomings molecular particles that cast the subject adrift along the margins of the template for conventional behavior.

In this sense, to become is a process of desire. Becoming is molecular; it mobilizes particles of turbulence, extracting them from the great molar oppositions. Where there were only two great molar sexes you will be A or B, man or woman , now there are a thousand small molecular sexes, in the empire of sensation, in the intensive.

Becoming-woman is not achieved by imitating women as a dual, identity-having entity, nor by transforming oneself into her. What we have here is a dominant mode of subjectification.

Being part of a minority, in the sociological sense, while creating the conditions for it, does not automatically unfold into becoming. Becoming black from white, but also becoming woman from woman. These becomings could trigger a certain micropolitics of perceptions and affect given that they would be affecting modes of segregation—interruptions that act directly at the level of bodies and desires.

Although minoritarian, these processes affect the totality of the social. The miniscule groupings of feminism, for example, did not impede the discourse from driving a series of mutations at the level of concrete relationships between the sexes, which continue to be produced despite a relative silencing of militant feminism. In the latter case, what held the early stages of a rupture with order transforms into a demand for knowledge for and within this same order.

It is followed by direct operations from the state powers. If in the case of the disappeared S. In truth, it is not that the battles are over; they seem to be displaced, rather, to the interior of new institutional apparatuses; it is worth, in any case, to confirm this displacement.

Outlining an archeology of identity—necessary albeit extensive work, without a doubt—would take us too far maybe to the essence of being itself. On this torturous journey, there are still the points of flights, destructurations, and rejections that are characteristic of the heteroclitic marginalities. In this context, a scenario is established which, if we heed Trevisan and his history of homosexuality in Brazil 24 , exhibits rather classical airs: on one hand, in the sphere of actions and daily passions, a multiplicity of desirous insurrections; on the other, at the level of current discourses, a certain compensatory hardening which tends to sever contact with the mutating experiments and begins to spin on its own axis, in the comfort of official or officious statements.

A double phenomenon: the savagery of daily disorder; the sterility of the discursive order. Some of these attempts have yielded tragic outcomes. It is interesting to underscore that often, dissidence is also exercised at the level of pleasure and corporeal experience itself. It follows that, in the bosom of concrete social relationships, many of the protagonists of processes of marginalization and differentiated minoritizations the margin is defined by its relationship with the center; a minority group makes its own self-referential codes find each other.

They were also increasingly settled by poor workers leaving the centre. A number of impulses acted as catalysts for this outward movement of the poor. Meanwhile, industrialists keen on freeing up more disposable income for product consumption among the employed lobbied for home ownership for workers. Some analysts suggest the most important factor that reinforced what was to become a centre-periphery dichotomy in the city was the rent freeze of the s.

Speculators and developers took advantage of the workers and many lots were sold fraudulently, or outside of the legal requirements of lot size and provision of services. As a result, even when individuals attempted to legally purchase land, many of their settlements were illegal and lacked basic infrastructure and services.

According to some commentators, the emergence of a public bus system was not a product of. Requiring less infrastructure and therefore being more versatile than street cars, buses could negotiate the rougher terrain of the periphery and offer the critical mobility that those contemplating a life far from the centre where most jobs were situated needed. The centre-periphery dichotomy A rapid process of peripheral development continued through the s, creating two distinct social spaces differentiated geographically and economically: a tale of two cities.

Low-density suburbs and exclusive high-rise apartment blocks became the territory of the well-heeled rich and middle classes. The centre-periphery dichotomy has provided fodder for many social analysts, who describe. The neighbourhoods that are neither exclusive nor precarious or illegal are important for understanding the emergence of the multi-centrality that has characterized the city from onward.

Ruralurban migration was at its highest during this era of rapid demographic change, and the country experienced widespread advances in child mortality, malnutrition and life expectancy, along with other social indicators. In the s, recession bit into the earlier economic success that drew so many people to the city, resulting in increased unemployment and poverty.

As the chances for adequate housing and social mobility became increasingly constricted for the poor, the city witnessed a rapid growth of shantytown settlements, or favelas. Informal, illegal settlements proportionally absorbed approximately 1 per cent of the population in , but by the early s they were home to almost 20 per cent.

Other industrial municipalities, including Guarulhos and Osasco, were also important parts of the conurbation. Verticalisation favoured the continuous growing land prices in those areas. But with the recession and increased. First, invasions of unused, precarious and environmentally fragile public and private spaces occurred in the city itself.

In , just 5. Apart from a clear decrease in the average family size in recent years, the depopulation of the centre can be attributed to a number of causes:.

Like the Billings and Guarapiranga reservoir areas, these slopes of the Serra da Cantareira currently have the highest growth rates of substandard, unplanned, irregular settlement. There was an absence of investment in new buildings, and refurbishment and modernizing of old ones.

Some middle-class families shifted from renting to purchasing their own homes, necessitating a move outside the centre to places where land prices were comparatively lower. In addition to these changes, the intermediary ring experienced an intense expansion of commerce and business and played a part in the relocation of the elite and middle classes.

Breaking the centre-periphery model Transport networks, both private and public, played an important role in facilitating the growth of the often illegal and informal. In many places, the shifting real estate development pitched the developers and their interest groups against favelados, who in many cases were already occupying parts of the newly up-and-coming areas.

See Special Feature 11 for a discussion of forced evictions in Jardim Edite. The characterization of social and spatial segregation became more complex with the breaking of the centre-periphery model. But social exclusion is a concept that, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder, as it can be hard to establish the standards against which it should be measured.

The term has a tendency to be used in different disciplines such as economics, sociology, politics and education to support particular arguments or critiques of certain conditions, and its severity depends on conditions considered normal or expected. The concept encompasses aspects of the marginalization, alienation or disenfranchisement of particular groups of people in relation to their opportunities and status within a city, affecting their social, political, economic and cultural horizons.

Exclusion often refers to a problem in the distribution of wealth or a loosening of the ties that bind society together and reinforce peo-. Many social analysts identify income, even more than education, as the critical gateway to increased social inclusion.

As a result, individuals may be excluded from political elections because they do not have a recognized residence or address. Likewise, the lack of an address, or an address in a bad area, can keep people from employment because employers may discriminate against them. Lack of proper access to water and sanitation is also due to a similar circle of social exclusion. While the government recognizes the need for improved living conditions in informal settlements, it is under pressure to prevent illegal land invasions of public land.

Houses in the massive favela Heliopolis being painted with bright colours in an upgrading initiative to raise self-esteem of residents. If the government invests in costly infrastructure in illegally settled areas, some people believe it may encourage new land invasions and legitimize illegal activities. Some urban studies show a lack of mobility as one of the factors causing social exclusion, because without reliable transportation, people are hard-pressed to get jobs or access key services such as healthcare and education.

In the sphere of politics, social recognition is obtained by full citizenship. Individuals may also be excluded by a real or perceived withholding of belonging or esteem — being denied a voice or formal recognition in the decision-making process. Since the end of the military regime in the early s, Brazilians have enjoyed a democratic renaissance with landmark universalisation of citizen rights in many spheres, expressed through legal instruments such as the Constitution and the City Statute.

These socio-political transformations, driven predominantly by powerful trade unions, activists and social movements, are now expressed in ongoing urban policy changes and a climate of apparent and increasing distributive justice. Nevertheless, the recent political triumphs on the part of the traditionally marginalized are also part of an ongoing urban struggle that takes place in a paradoxical society of huge inequality and persistent social exclusion.

These aspects represent critical elements of social inclusion. By legalising and democratizing citizen rights, the activists have therefore been embraced by the system and must now work from within it. The notion of social inclusion can vary according to the type of strategies organizations adopt to address conditions where people appear to be systematically blocked from rights, opportunities and resources such as adequate housing, employment, health-.

Urban struggles for the right to the city are central to social inclusion The difference in access by different social groups to different elements of all of these sub-sectors is clear and shown in numerous sub-sector studies on aspects ranging from health outcomes to education, human security, recreational choices and social mobility. By contrast, in developing countries, people may never have had acceptable living conditions, so social exclusion must be based on an understanding of what a basic standard of living would be in that context.

Such a statement is itself slightly misleading and presumptuous in terms of causality: it could be argued that the city and its development has merely juxtaposed, concentrated and made visible aspects of social exclusions that have riddled Brazilian society throughout history. Different social groups lived and worked closer to each other than they would today. The urban elite comprised merchants, professionals and governmental bureaucrats; wealthy plantation owners moved easily between their country villas and city mansions; and poor white labourers, urban slaves, free black people and poor European and Asian migrants all coexisted in the city.

Once republican values of equality were established, spatial segregation became important to differentiate social groups that had become equal according to the law. To suggest social exclusion, elitism, social segregation or discrimination was born through the rapid and recent urbanising process clearly would be to misunderstand social divisions already existing in Brazilian society, but the more recent socio-spatial segregation was not adequately addressed until after the adoption of the Constitution, which gave urban citizens explicitly inclusive urban rights.

The family had no legal possession of the property, and they used illegal electricity. A few days after this photo was taken, their home was destroyed and they became homeless Image: Marcelo Min Fotogarrafa Agency. It had been a makeshift police station before becoming a tenement with 60 families in the early s. A homeless group, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra Leste 1, claimed five empty lots around the house, which were then purchased by the municipality for a pioneering project involving collaborative building of popular houses.

The project was initiated in , with the support of Mayor Luiza Erundina and the self-help building projects of the Mutirao movement. By the time the project began, of the 60 families who originally lived in the old mansion, 20 declined to join the redevelopment association and were compensated by the municipality.

Those who chose to participate were transferred to a temporary accommodation in the central square. Of the 40 families that stuck it out, 38 are still living in the buildings today. The significant quantity of money spent on this housing project is supposed to be returned to municipal coffers by the residents. However, because of an impasse in negotiating the value of benefits, the residents have still not begun to pay for housing. Therefore, they do not have legal ownership of the property, but only acquired rights.

Despite this, 12 per cent of units have been sold by their original owners. Formerly owned by the family of a coffee baron, the property accumulated so many municipal debts.

In addition to the apartments distributed in four five-story buildings, the property has a central plaza, two lounges, a library, a playroom, two collective laundries and five stores. But the buildings look shabby and the gardens unkempt and the whole compound is surrounded by high-level wire to prevent intruders.

Some adolescent delinquency. Felipe lived in a tenement before joining in the self-help building movement. Today, she is a kind of manager of the apartments, where she lives with her husband and their adopted daughter, Taiane, 9.

The bills are divided up by apartment, not per resident. Some residents had a hard time accepting this unit-based fee structure, because it is common practice in tenements to charge per person; some of the residents packed as many as eight people into the tiny 38 square metre apartments.

With nine years of experience living in tenements, Felipe is sure that people in this kind of housing suffer a great deal. In the tenement, he is frequently exploited. Felipe is now employed by the government as a community health agent.

She sees the advantage of the community helping system as the fact that the neighbours know each other from the begining.

Family members shared small rooms and shared, with other families, a single working tap and two toilets. Image: Christopher Horwood. Hirsch avoids his shortcut through the slum after dark. After taking part in the long-term Integrated Transportation Planning studies for the city, he is convinced that the solution is not to provide more transport, but to stimulate the location of industries and services throughout the region, so that residents do not need to travel to work every day in the city centre or other distant areas.

He points to some interesting figures from the study: while in the city centre there are nearly 30 jobs per capita, in the eastern zone, there are people per job. Every morning, he spends between 50 minutes and an hour and a half driving from home to his office downtown. To escape traffic congestion, Hirsch has developed two strategies: wake up earlier to avoid the peak rush hour at 7 a. Escaping the traffic by driving on these secondary roads — including some dirt ones — has become a habit for many residents of the buildings in the Morumbi neighbourhood, one of the most.

In the building, where Hirsch has lived with his family in a square metre apartment for 20 years, most of the porters and maids are residents of the slum across Giovanni Gronchi Avenue, the main and most congested road in the neighbourhood. Because of the difficulty of moving through the city, the middle- and upper-class residents are totally dependent on the automobile. This situation was even. But even the Metro will not offer a definitive solution to his problem of losing time in traffic.

As Morumbi subway station is going to be located about five kilometres from his home, there is still a problem: how is he going to get there? The answer is by car, of course. To the west are tree-lined streets and luxury buildings.

To the south, the landscape is very different: instead of green trees, the orange bricks of almost 18, favela houses dominate. A few yards away, beyond the favela, is a high-rise luxury condo building with private swimming pools visible on every balcony. For Hirsch, the proximity to the slum is not a problem. The only thing that could dissuade him from living in Morumbi is the traffic. But he likes the apartment and does not intend to move.

According to one analyst, some of the most important include disparities in employment conditions, differences in access to land and other physical assets, discrepancies in the use of and access to health care, education, housing, human security and other public goods and social services, and differences in the right of access to political participation and to legal institutions that may protect and promulgate individual rights. At the same time, dimensions of inequality often overlap and reinforce one another.

Although people cannot be easily typecast into polarized categories as excluded or included, neither it is always clear on which side of an unequal society people live. And even when resources appear to be more equitably shared, the quality of service and opportunities available to different sections of society may be very different. Aside from genuine problems they may face, many favelados possess a wide selection of consumer products such as televisions, DVD players, mobile phones, water heaters, washing machines and refrigerators.

Such household amenities, combined with increasing access to water, sanitation, electricity, land regularization, cash transfers and other services, elevate many favelados to a standard of living that would be the envy of slum dwellers in Lagos, Nairobi, Delhi or Dhaka, for example.

Recent studies indicate that a significant proportion of services are in fact services directly related to industrial production. Agriculture represents just 6.

Sugar cane and coffee production remain active and important sectors. The minimum salary impact Income levels in Brazil are measured in absolute terms as well by quantities of the minimum salary MS. Brazilian states can set higher minimum wages, which may vary in different economic sectors. Despite rela-. There has been one major constant in relation to earnings in Brazil since World War II: a wide disparity in the wage scale, owing in part to the low wages of unskilled labour.

The Brazilian national minimum wage is adjusted annually. The federal government claimed that Economists disagree on the impact of the minimum salary on labour and income markets in developing economies. Those promoting distributive justice and egalitarian economic growth cite its potential to reduce poverty, enhance productivity and foster economic growth.

In theory, it puts more money. In practice, there are indications that the informal sector grows as a direct result of the MS laws that either restrict small businesses from employing more people or cause them to lay off existing staff. They also claim it reduces. In his second term, his government has continued to raise the MS level. To date, the minimum wage has risen approximately 46 per cent since President Lula da Silva came to power in His government claims to have lifted millions of Brazilians out of destitution in recent years — an achievement discussed in Chapter 1.

Households acquire income from different sources that are not always easy to capture in income surveys. A common problem is un-. Other income values, such as utility subsidies, tax rebates or direct cash handouts in the form of social security also need to be assessed. The wealthy also have alternative income streams that may include some informal enterprises, rental from property, dividends on stocks, interest on savings or an inheritance.

Clearly, some income such. According to one study, between and , the share of household per capita income from employment fell from 60 per cent to 50 per cent of the total. The declining shares of income from employment and self-employment are compensated by rising shares for the labour income of employers and, most importantly, for social security incomes. Additionally, the provision of universal free preschool and primary school, and the availability of basic health and sanitation infrastructure in favela areas greatly increase consumption value for the poor, even as their incomes remain low.

According to the same study, the share of the population receiving incomes from social security programmes has almost doubled since , from 16 per cent to 30 per cent.

Further, Almost 2 per cent had no income. The next table reveals the heterogeneity of incomes among households in both categories. The vulnerable areas had a relatively high proportion of households A further Only In the non-vulnerable areas surveyed, only A surprising Furthermore, the data suggests that an average of 70 per cent of the MRSP households earn only three MS or less from their main employment.

Despite the considerable additions made by earnings from the informal sector, private holdings and social security, the data reveals that for most of the population, household incomes are low. Table 4. Clearly, the additional income gained from alternative work and activities is what mitigates the high average of households on three MS or less. Nevertheless, even with additional income, approximately one-third of all households remain at the three MS or less level in the municipality and in the wider Metropolitan region.

At the other end of the spectrum, only 2. Nevertheless, the data is striking. It shows. Even more dramatically, seven times more infants of poor families die than those of rich families throughout the 39 municipalities of the MRSP. Inequalities in health-care access and health outcomes remain a major challenge in Brazil. Groups such as the mentally ill or the elderly have also been shown to have problems obtaining appropriate and equitable treatment.

Regional and income-group health inequalities are particularly dramatic. For example, the rate of infant mortality in the north is twice as high as the same measure in the south. In , it was 2. More than 97 per cent of all women give birth in one of over 6, hospitals, or receive outpatient care in one of the 65, health centres.

In relation to immunization against measles and tuberculosis or the presence of professional attendant at births, Brazil achieved 99 per cent coverage in Measles vaccine coverage has been per cent for some years. Per capita investment in health per year was higher than in many countries with more highly rated levels of human development. Brazil also has doctors per , people, scoring much higher on this measure than many countries within the.

Today the mansion has been restored and is a museum. Since the mids, the public health system in Brazil has undergone expansion, decentralization and economic re-. As a result, the private sector, which participates in the system in a complementary form through contracts and agreements with the public sector, has emerged as a major payer of health care in Brazil in the last decade, creating a two-tier health system.

The constitution therefore grants all Brazilian citizens the right to procure free medical assistance from public or private providers reimbursed by the government. While the public. According to many authors, the controversial aspect is that the private domain subtracts participants from the public system SUS , restraining its targets of universality and equity. The distribution of hospitals and outpatient facilities favours the south and southeast of the country, at levels two to four times higher per capita than in the north and northeast, where health conditions are more precarious and where the need for health care is greater.

The distinction between vulnerable and non-vulnerable is based on education and income; the data reveals that only 34 per cent of the vulnerable households have access to medical establishments in their proximate areas, while 65 per cent of non-vulnerable households said they had hospitals and clinics in their neighbourhoods.

Coverage of health posts appears to be much more equitable: 78 per cent of vulnerable households live close to a health post, compared with Despite these differences, the overall level of access to medical assistance and treatment in the MRSP is high. Health posts, clinics and hospitals are generally available in most neighbourhoods, clearly illustrating the urban advantage: a concentration of population close to a concentration of resources and services.

The regression results of a recent economic study show a negative association between the decision to purchase private. Among the 12 urban districts studied six wealthy and six poor , adverse health outcomes were between three and 24 times higher in the poorest districts than in the richest.

While infant mortality rates were three to four times higher in poor districts than rich ones, it is rates of death among young men that point to the greatest disparities: mortality among men age 15 to. With dozens of hospitals and hundreds of health centres supported by a comprehensive national health doctrine of free and equitable health, MRSP offers more than many cities of comparable size and state of development.

Of course, health is also inextricably linked to customs, behaviour, diet, lifestyle, the natural environment, and the availability of health facilities and standards of delivery. Within Brazilian cities, access to improved water and sanitation. Between and , for example, while 88 per cent of urban Brazilians had access to safe water, the same was true of only 25 per cent of the rural population.

At the same time, an estimated 80 per cent of urban Brazilians had adequate sanitation, while only 30 per cent of the rural population had the same. The same issues that are at the heart of a divided city — spatial segregation, social exclusion and unequal access to resources — underpin issues of water management, environmental protection, slum upgrading, pollution control and the provision of utilities.

Policy, regulation and service provision At the national level, the Ministry of Cities coordinates sector policies, which are implemented by various ministries. Regulation of service provision is a responsibility of the municipalities. State companies are also in charge of sewer services in municipalities with a total population of 45 million, corresponding to about 55 per cent of the population with access to sewerage.

Most state water and sewer companies are public-private enterprises, with the majority of shares owned by the respective state government. Some state companies operate under concession contracts with municipalities, while others operate under the authority of state governments.

Before , municipalities were responsible for the provision of water and sanitation. The plan to support the national drive to universalize water and sanitation services was implemented in the s and s. Beginning in , the government set up State Water and Sanitation Companies. CESBs in every Brazilian state.

According to one World Bank report, coverage of water provision among urban residents around the country expanded from 45 per cent to 95 per cent between and , and sanitation coverage increased from 24 per cent to 42 per cent. Unequal distribution But the rapid expansion of services was not equally distributed. Not surprisingly, the south — home of the surplus-creating, richer markets — was favoured over the north, and the biggest cities were favoured over the smaller urban centres and rural areas.

One major reason for this imbalance was the attractiveness of water investment in communities where the population could be expected to pay for the services. Under the current government of President Lula da Silva, Brazil appears to be committed to meeting the MDGs for a wide range of human development and survival indicators. The government claims to be tackling inequality throughout the country. In January , the President signed a new federal water and sanitation law that aims to increase investments to provide universal access to.

Despite considerable efforts there are still numerous areas in Guarapiranga where slum upgrading, sanitation services and protection of waterways is required. Another mechanism to reduce unequal access to water and sewage is the use of different, progressive tariff levels and subsidies. Water and sanitation tariffs in many Brazilian cities are relatively high compared to the Latin American average.

According to a study,95 the typical monthly residential water bill for con-. In some cases, a minimum consumption fee applies to all residential connections, and sometimes to commercial and institutional connections.

To avoid subsidizing households that could contribute more toward the cost of water provision, some state water companies have improved the targeting of their social tariffs by using the cadastres established for the Bolsa Familia Conditional Cash Transfer Programme. NRW can be attributed to poor infrastructure, theft or faulty metering issues — anything that diverts the water supply before it reaches legitimate clients.

Clearly, theft or unregulated tapping into the water supply is part of NRW and is common practice in favelas and other informal settlements. It is estimated that partners would need to invest far more than they currently do if inequality is to be narrowed and the MDG goals are to be met — which Brazil would only achieve in if the current level of investment would be maintained Water pollution compounds the problem of water scarcity, and it is the presence of large numbers of informal settlements in and around water catchment areas that has caused the problem and forced authorities to develop pro-poor solutions.

The colonies of art are places of seclusion and islands of resistance in a sea of uniformity. Art reveals those inner layers of the world that remain hidden to the superficial gaze of politics and sociology.

There is a great deal to say in favour of the assertion that art has taken the place of philosophy as the interpreter of the world. Artists create a power-free zone, a world that runs contrary to the existing one: a land of emptiness, of silence and respite, where the frenzy that surrounds us is brought to a standstill for a moment. But it is also a land of enigmas, where the flood of images surging in on us from the breeding grounds of kitsch are encrypted. By breaking through the barriers of the material world, the artist becomes a smuggler of images between cultures.

Art knows no hierarchy. The question of what is old or new, peripheral or central, modern or primitive, is posed in a way entirely different to that of economics. Art eludes the calculating ways and the hysteria of modern society. While industry continues to furnish the world, the prime task of contemporary art is to purify it. Abstraction plays a privileged role in this context.

It avoids the garrulousness of the modern world and creates a sublime counterpoint. These refuges of art, which enable the imagination to extend beyond the everyday sphere, are in fact the corrective to the all-consuming maelstrom of the urban drama.

In the realm of abstraction, says Kandinsky, every form is a citizen with equal rights. Although art does not necessarily make us better human beings, writes Harold Bloom in an essay on Shakespeare, it does help us to put up with ourselves and our loneliness more easily.

Art generates the desire to be someone else and to travel along a timeline to inaccessible places. The task of interpreting the world, and particularly its transformation into pictures, attracts other, competing media into the arena in addition to art: first and foremost the picture machines of the mass media and design. Mass media and design generate ideas and concepts that do not question real conditions or their values, but confirm and continue them.

They produce shallow pictures, whereas art creates deep, heavy, complex ones. Design operates on the assumption that something can ever be finished and completed. Art, by contrast, assumes that nothing is ever finished.

Design asserts, art asks. Design excitedly brandishes its claim to be fashionable; art is self-sufficient and allows itself differences from the idealized picture of the life offered to us, for instance, by advertising. Whereas the latter wants a convincing photographic image of the present, art produces a picture of the future.

Fundamentally it is the precise opposite of art. Hans Belting writes on this subject: "Classical modern painting was sometimes only able to enforce its radiant autonomy by driving out the pictures, in order to cleanse its temple. It preferred to leave the pictures, which were infected by the world, to other media.

Painting, as the representative of art, and pictures, as records of the world, declared war on each other. We need not go as far as Stendhal, who said that politics, when it penetrates the realm of the imagination, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert.

Even so, expecting art to directly change reality is simultaneously expecting too much and too little of it: too much, because it cannot prevent a war — it can at best ease the war raging in our own breasts — and too little, because it can do much more than that: it can establish a humane counter-world to an inhumane present.

Although every aesthetic experience, and the catharsis that results from it, is something eminently subjective, in specific cases the transformation of the individual can almost be measured empirically. Ultimately, art is more radical than politics, because it reaches into the spiritual levels of the individual, where the real transformation of human society takes place. Art stands above day-to-day events and has something fundamental to say to them precisely for this reason.

A world which has become similar to hell and in which weltschmerz has become deeply ingrained cannot be depicted by art as hell, because it would then lose its essential function of standing firm, of being the counter-model. In a successful work of art the unresolved antagonisms of the world appear at a distance from reality.

The artist creates something different, something that is not identical to society, while nevertheless referring to it. Goethe already noted that "there is no more reliable way of retreating from the world than through art, and there is no more certain way of combining with it than through art. In the last few years art has become overloaded with day-to-day politics.

Artists and their audiences are called upon to alleviate the adversities of reality on an ad-hoc basis. Tried-and-tested visual and sculptural strategies are suppressed in favor of pretentious sociological discourses. Exhibitions frequently show not pictures, but politically correct attitudes.